> "I prefer to think of "poaching" in more appropriate terms -- supply and demand."

Exactly. It isn't poaching, it's competing. I wouldn't want to work at a place that thought of talent as property to be "poached".

Similarly, I tend to consider the presence of "human resources" people/departments to be a red flag.

It's just a metaphorical term of art. Most people wouldn't want to work with "garbage collection" every day, but of course many programmers do.

It's a metaphorical term of art, but also a sentiment among companies. They do treat talent as property, surprisingly often.

And there's often a fair bit of tit-for-tat and specific arrangements about poaching and when it's okay. Which is understandable in such a small, chummy industry (think Silicon Valley venture-backed startups, which are all about networking).

But it's also illegal, and devalues programmers, both monetarily and metaphorically.

Yeah, it's a metaphor that analogizes people and property.

I wouldn't have any qualms about working with, say, purchasing managers who talked about "poaching" component orders from one another, because they'd be talking about property as property.

Do you really not see the difference?

I think you're really stretching here. The core issue is whether companies value their employees--that comes through in how the employees actually get treated, not the use of one word vs. another.

I think it's pretty hard to truly value and treat someone well if you think and speak of them as property.

From your point of view, what you say is true.

From the company's point of view, they've invested in finding you, and getting you up to speed, and now they have to start over. Even if they get someone equally talented at the same pay, the company has lost that initial recruiting cost and investment. So from their point of view, that's what is being "poached."

That is not counting the time it will cost to do these things.

If a company wants to avoid that situation, they have plenty of options available. They could offer employees long-term contracts, so the stability goes both ways. They could try to be more proactive in fixing the problems that make people want to leave. They could pull a Google and try to make their work environment so good that it's almost impossible to replicate.

For the most part, companies don't do these things, and then get surprised when employees leave. They want to have their cake and eat it too, and are upset to discover that the labor market works both ways.

I learned at a previous employer that HR's "how big should our raises be this year" numbers were influenced by year over year turnover trends. If too many people quit, raises went up the next year.

Sounds exactly like properly evaluating supply and demand to get the result that they want.

True. It also implies that employees are fungible.

This is a common assumption but employees should nevertheless recognize their artificially constrained career prospects in such a system.

That's a cost of doing business. Any employment relationship is a week to week exchange of services for money. Employees and employers do generally invest their reputations and goodwill in the relationships, but the ultimate distillation of employment is my money for your time.

The fact that some employers have more costly onboarding processes than others is a competitive disadvantage, not a rationale for demand-side collusion in the job market.